WooCommerce came out of WooThemes' existing WordPress theme business: Mark and his co-founders had spent years selling themes, and support tickets and sales data made it obvious customers wanted more e-commerce functionality than a theme alone could provide, so they moved into plugin development.

“It was quite clear that our customers were demanding more and more functionality from an evolving WordPress.”

WooCommerce's core was released free in the WordPress.org plugin repository, which is how the product picked up its first large wave of users and downloads.

Paying customers came from the free-plugin user base upgrading to commercial extensions once they needed store functionality the free core didn't cover, the classic freemium upsell path rather than a distinct paid-acquisition motion.